Regeneration through violence : the mythology of the American frontier, 1600-1860

by: Slotkin, Richard, 1942-

Publication date: 1973

Topics: Littérature américaine -- Histoire et critique, mythos, Mythologie dans la littérature, Américains, American literature History and criticism, USA -- Weststaaten, Frontier and pioneer life in literature, American literature -- History and criticism, Regeneration in literature, National characteristics, American, Myth in literature, Violence in literature, American literature

Publisher: Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press

Collection: inlibrary; printdisabled; marygrovecollege; internetarchivebooks; americana

Digitizing sponsor: Kahle/Austin Foundation

Contributor: Internet Archive

Language: English

viii, 670 pages ; 24 cm

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a savage new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries -- including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville -- Slotkin traces the full development of this myth

Includes bibliographical references (pages 593-622)

American Historical Association Albert A. Beveridge Award, 1973

Myth and literature in the New World -- Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian culture -- Home in the heart of darkness: the origin of the Indian War narratives (1625-1682) -- Israel in Babylon: the archetype of the captivity narratives (1682-1700) -- A palisade of language: captivity mythology and the social crisis (1688-1693) -- The hunting of the beast: initiation or exorcism? (1675-1725) -- The search for a hero and the problem of the "natural man" (1700-1765) -- A gallery of types: the evolution of literary genres and the image of the American (1755-1785) -- Narrative into myth: the emergence of a hero (1784) -- Evolution of the national hero: farmer to hunter to Indian (1784-1855) -- Society and solitude: the frontier myth in romantic literature (1795-1825) -- The fragmented image: the Boone myth and sectional cultures (1820-1850) -- Man without a cross: the Leatherstocking myth (1823-1841) -- A pyramid of skulls